If the government had found a way to save US$10 for every dollar it spent helping low-income people get healthier, wouldn’t it make sense for it to keep doing that?
Well, that’s exactly what the U.S. government did when it piloted the SNAP-Ed program in 1977. This U.S. Department of Agriculture program persisted for nearly 50 years until the Trump administration shuttered it in 2025.
SNAP-Ed served as the nutrition education arm of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which helps more than 40 million Americans buy groceries.
SNAP-Ed complemented SNAP by teaching people who get those benefits how best to use that government assistance. It paid for nutrition educators to teach lessons at schools, community centers and university extension offices. The educators led grocery store tours, taught label reading and budget comparisons, and taught cooking classes. And they offered a mix of printed and online resources to support good nutrition in the home.
While the federal government fully funded the program, the states, along with Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, administered and implemented SNAP-Ed through local community programs, often partnering with nonprofits. It cost only one penny for every SNAP dollar spent, and it worked.
But as of Oct. 1, 2025, SNAP-Ed ceased to exist due to spending cuts that were part of the big tax reform and budget package President Donald Trump signed into law three months earlier.
Dealing with the aftermath
To see why focusing on teaching food preparation skills is so critical, imagine discovering a flat tire. Do you need someone to tell you to fix it or someone to show you how? Nutrition works the same way.
We’ve all left the doctor’s office with instructions to “eat better,” which is essentially useless without the tools to do so. SNAP-Ed taught people how to identify healthy food patterns, keep food safe and navigate a complex food environment.
It also taught low-income Americans how to improve their budgeting and planning for meals that balance cost and nutrition. It’s nearly impossible to meet your basic nutritional needs if you are relying on SNAP dollars alone to fill your grocery cart. Skills are required.
States are getting creative to find ways to preserve aspects of the SNAP-Ed program. In Georgia, alternative funding sources might keep programs running for about a year. In Wyoming, a less local, more regional model has helped allow for the continuation of some programs previously funded by the SNAP-Ed program.
In my own state, Michigan State University Extension, which served as Michigan’s statewide implementing partner for SNAP-Ed, lost over $10 million in federal support when SNAP-Ed was defunded. The extension’s staff is working to keep its curricula, lesson plans, recipes and other training materials available online to the public in an effort to sustain its work.
Educating 1.2 million people
Because SNAP-Ed funding has been eliminated, the programs it supported are disappearing or shrinking. As a result, every SNAP dollar may not be spent as wisely as before.
In 2025, SNAP spending was over $100 billion, while SNAP-Ed operated on a $536 million budget, educating over 1.2 million people on how best to spend their SNAP dollars and improve their health.
SNAP-Ed’s benefits persist today, but without continued training and support its impact will diminish, decades of trust built in communities will be lost, and the health of communities no longer served will suffer.
But for now, at least, SNAP-Ed’s online resources remain freely available.
Reducing diabetes risks
As a dietitian and a professor, I often conduct community-based participatory research aimed at improving health in low-income populations, especially those at risk for developing Type 2 diabetes.
In a pilot study my research team helped conduct in Detroit in 2018, we paired the Centers for Disease Control’s National Diabetes Prevention Program with Cooking Matters, a course funded by SNAP-Ed that taught meal planning, hands-on meal prep and food resource management.
We wanted to see whether SNAP-Ed skills training would amplify the benefits of the National Diabetes Prevention Program in a low-income community.
It did.
All 23 participants in this Detroit pilot lost weight and lowered their hemoglobin A1c, a key marker of diabetes risk.
All but one participant moved from prediabetic to nondiabetic sugar levels, effectively reversing prediabetes.
The National Diabetes Prevention Program often has trouble retaining study participants in low-income communities where Type 2 diabetes risk and health care costs are significant problems.
Not only did our findings show how SNAP-ED was boosting health in several at-risk communities, but they also provided evidence for the economic benefits of the program.
To estimate how much money the government saved through SNAP-Ed, the USDA compiled data from multiple studies like ours, finding that every dollar spent in community health education ultimately saved $10.64 in Medicaid spending by the government.
If a drugmaker invented a pill that cut diabetes risk by 40% and reduced a key diabetes marker like HbA1c by nearly one percentage point, I have no doubt that it would be hailed as a miracle.
Our study achieved exactly these outcomes through inexpensive, skills-based education. And yet the Trump administration ended the education program that funding this kind of work.
Conflicting with the administration’s own goals
The Make America Healthy Again movement has both embraced Trump and a core principle: Healthy habits prevent chronic disease. It doesn’t make sense to me, in light of that movement, for the Trump administration to stop funding SNAP-Ed.
The program has helped reduce the prevalence of many chronic diseases, and this could have been expected to yield up to $1 trillion in health care savings by 2030.
As the popular proverb goes: “Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.” SNAP-Ed taught over 1.2 million people how to fish every year, all for a little more than the latest estimates of what it’s going to cost to build the White House ballroom.